CAIN: Lawrence, your attempt to say that I sat on the sidelines is an irrelevant comparison that you're trying to deduce from that particular point in time. I know what’s in my book. Now, let me ask you a question: Did you expect every black student in every black college in America to be out there in the middle of every fight? The answer is no. So for you to say why was I sitting on the sidelines, I think that was an inaccurate deduction that you’re trying to make. You didn’t know, Lawrence, what I was doing with the rest of my life. You didn’t know what my family situation may have been. Maybe, just maybe, I had a sick relative which is why I might not have been sitting in doing the Freedom Rides. So what I’m saying is, with all due respect my friend, is your deduction is incorrect, and it’s not logical. Okay?

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O'DONNELL: Well, I gave your book a fair reading and I didn’t read anything about a sick friend. What I read was a deliberate decision to not participate in the Civil Rights movement and the Civil Rights protest. And, I read a misleading sentence that indicated that in time, that what you tried to say here in the show, that you were in high school at that time when in fact you were in college from 1963 to 1967 right where it was happening in Atlanta, Georgia.

CAIN: Lawrence, Lawrence, Lawrence. I’m going to try this one more time. I graduated from high school in 1963, okay? I didn’t start college until the fall of 1963. I don’t understand why you’re trying to make a big deal out of this small point when we have an economy that is on life support, we’ve got 14 million people out of work and you want to try to deduce something that’s incorrect from my words in my book.

Whether or not you think Cain’s level of involvement in the civil rights movement is relevant to the 2012 campaign, it’s striking that he won’t give a straightforward answer to this biographical question. It’s not, you know, unheard-of for college students to be politically engaged. So if Cain made a decision not to participate in the civil rights movement, why not just say so and defend it? And did he really have a sick relative that kept him out of the struggle? If not, why speculate about one?

Given how much of Cain’s shtick is race-based, it’s not unfair to ask him what he was up to when civil equality was won. It also seems like a fair question to ask presidential candidates who aren’t black. (Joe Biden, who’s a little older than Cain, addressed his distance from civil rights activism in a 2010 biography by Jules Witcover.)